


Needlepoint

by ChanceyPlath



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Evil is Afoot, F/F, F/M, M/M, Warning: Suicide, alcohol is involved in making bad decisions, art hoe buddies, at least for now, everyone is gay and alive, plants are involved, the dumbass death of james wesley gets fixed, the gays are breaking the law and they dont even care, vanessa kicks butt, warning: blood and stabbing near the start but pretty low-key, warning: suicide bomber
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-25 11:35:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7531162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChanceyPlath/pseuds/ChanceyPlath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wilson Fisk hires Wesley's ex-girlfriend to find out who killed him (because that couldn't possibly go wrong), Karen loses her shit, Foggy is adorable, and Wesley isn't stupid enough to get himself killed like that because he isn't a moron.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Our Mutual Friend

The cold amusement in Fisk’s dark eyes and twitching his wire mouth struck her sharply as he strolled towards her, glowing in his orange suit and followed by an unusually quiet and demure line of other inmates who were mostly dressed in white. His shadow, that hideous lawyer of his that had almost kidnapped her into coming, stood at Fisk’s shoulder for the whole visit with his hands in his pocket, no doubt with some kind of recording equipment hidden inside. No-one sat down at their phone booths until Fisk did and the vibrations from his chair crawled up her legs and back. Madeline knew what she was here for, more or less at least, and the image of his casual stroll towards his place, the snap of his head as he caught sight of her so quick that she thought it would break off from his massive shoulder and roll towards her.

He would try to break her preconceptions once the conversation got started, make her realise that this was a little more complicated than a desperate criminal trying to make amends, which would undoubtedly be easier if he let her see the ‘façade’ unravel. Begin by acting the part of the mean and scary master criminal, and then replace it one tiny bit at a time to show the softer side within. She had seen him work this technique before, from both sides, and he knew that. The war of nerves and fear in Madeline’s stomach was pressed down by a small flicker of a personality that she had herself tried to crush. The world of cloak and dagger, or more appropriately guns and drugs, which she had mostly experienced from the comfort of a desk and mountains of account books for the better part of her career, was instinct the moment she stepped in the building.

Twenty-five desks and twenty-five white chairs made a border in the middle of the room, precisely three metres apart from each other in every direction with the outside desks five metres from the nearest wall. Every effort that had been made to make all the criminals around her look the same was bloody pointless. It wasn’t until the inmates coming in behind him began to fan out that she realised why, but the thought was immediate and unrelenting. There were inmates of all shapes, sizes, and colour in that slowly breaking queue, all ashen-faced and glum to some degree. Some looked like they belonged and some didn’t, but no-one looked quite like he did, not like they had been born to wear them, or that they could be anything but uncomfortable in them in the company of their loved ones. Fisk could have walked into the London Ritz in those overalls and no-one would have batted an eye. There were criminals in guard uniforms, suits, overalls, and pink shirts and jeans, and everyone knew they were all the same. Appearances meant nothing.

He was the only one in that crowded room who fit into them almost stereotypically, to a level of surreal clarity that disturbed not just the visitors but the guards as well. Every visitor in that room was already feeling fragile under the pressure of expectation, trying to figure out if they could make amends with those they’d lost, or bring some semblance of sanity back into the miserable lives of their loved ones, they all forgot their purpose when he stepped in the room. It wasn’t anything physical about him or any particular part of his body that pulled people’s eyes to him, that made them shiver in ways they weren’t sure were good or bad for reasons they couldn’t quite touch, or even in the smooth way he walked over to his assigned table with Madeline waiting patiently behind the thin protection of glass she knew wasn’t bullet-proof. He could have been nameless to them or they could have all read this personal biography five times over (several of these had been published since his arrest, many instantly becoming New York Times bestsellers), they would still have stared. All of them.

Madeline didn’t know where she fit into this not entirely alien dynamic at first until he started to speak. In the silence before, she wished she had never come and that she had simply taken the bullet that his lawyer threatened to put in her skull. She also knew that if this moment was a mere six years earlier, a heroic criminal mastermind imploring her for help and drowning in the consequences of his moral deficiency. It was the ugliest truth about her that she enjoyed that feeling of righteousness, bitter and whole, and it never came with a more full-bodied kick than when she could see them face to face. Another part of her squeaked that he was definitely fatter than the last time she saw him but she suppressed it for fear of bursting out laughing.

Madeline Now, Madeline much aware of not just what this man had done to the city she was raised in, but who had also learned how much Fisk had managed to influence her livelihood, her career, and more painfully her clients and cases, Madeline Now felt cheated. She felt a burning nausea and rage that he would dare to bring her here, drag her out of the safe pocket she’d created in the city, and hold a knife to the sanctity of the new life she’d made without even telling her why. Of course she _knew_ why, it wasn’t going to be about anyone else, but it had been three or four years since, why now? _Why not?_

Oh, she could have refused. She could have walked away or hung up the phone and gone to her desk the next morning to give financial advice to single mothers and out-of-work dentists. To do that, however, would be to doubt that Fisk was as powerless as a new-born baby, that the FBI had rounded up all of his connections, and that there would not be an unwelcome visitor in her home at the end of the day, waiting to provide a gentle reminder of the virtues of good manners and the practice of reciprocity. The very face that he had managed to contact her in the first place refuted that, and it poked her back over the edge into a past life which had a lingering and unpleasant taste of rusted iron. Perhaps that was just the air here. Perhaps she should have run as soon as she got the phone call. But there was her sister to think of and her tiny niece-or-nephew-to-be, and she was curious. Naturally. Unavoidably.

It would not be untrue to sat he looked pleased to see her, but she doubted that pleasure was anything akin to an affectionate welcome. It was a greedy pleasure, the look of a man remembering what it was like to get everything that he asked for, and as it spread across his face into an uncomfortable smile it fought with the sight of his prison overalls as if the mere fact she had come was enough to make them disappear and turn into a well-tailored suit and tie, enough to make him a free man. That thought of that was ice to her. She would listen to what he wanted, find out what strange desire lay behind the madman’s gaze, most likely refuse - no, she was set on refusing, as politely as possible - and then she would leave and go home.

‘Thank you for agreeing to meet with me, Miss Dawson,’ he said quietly, watching his prison-mates settle down to their families, friends, and lawyers. ‘I wasn’t sure that you would want to come.’  On the ride home, pulled over in a roadside café with a tin roof and horrific coffee, Madeline would wonder if he regretted that he had none of these tiny comforts, save from his lawyer and that unfortunate Murdock encounter which Fisk’s lawyer had told her about with the most exceptional detail. Right now she felt nothing, which was actually a comfort to her because it was familiar, draining any emotional energy and spending conversations of a knife-edge caution.

‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘And I did. I want to know what you want from me, and I want to know why you want me to do it. I don’t want to help you, at least not yet. I’m retired, Mr. Fisk, for good reason.’ There it was, that old voice of hers. Tones she hadn’t used in years didn’t just slip back in but almost erased all memory of how she spoke now, as if it didn’t exist and cool, sharp bitterness was all she had ever known. _‘Dumbledore’s got style…’_ , _‘Carver has a shipment coming in on Thursday…’_ , _‘Take-over is out of the question - he has to be taken_ out _.’_

Fisk shook his head once, up and down, in such a gentle way that it reminded her of John Coffey in _The Green Mile_ , simultaneously knowing and dumb. She had expected that, having slid into the third year of a lifelong sentence, that something of the mature and pristine gentleman figure would have been gone from him. She had no previous first-hand memories of him to go on, but Fisk looked exactly like the photographs from the three year old newspapers she had dug out from the public library. Exactly like he had in the news footage she had watched all night, with nothing but the lines on his face seeming different than before. They weren’t quite deeper, in fact they were precisely the same depth and length as before, and maybe seeing them first-hand gave them a strange quality the way that everything seen for the first time seems intriguing. She wanted to focus on those flaws, she wanted to see the cracks in the kingpin, and maybe he wanted her to see them to add to the “wounded man” mask he was putting on.

‘I’m more than happy to answer your questions, Madeline,’ here he stopped and raised his hands as if he had caused a mortal offence, ‘if I may call you Madeline. But everything I’m about to tell you and everything you were told over the phone weaves together into one story, though you do not see it just yet.’ The guards began wandering down the aisle like exam invigilators, hands softly gripping their batons seemingly by instinct every time they got close to Fisk’s table.

A stench of nothingness suddenly hit her, a smell she hadn’t caught before, not the absence of a smell but the smell of absolutely nothing. That smell of nothingness wasn’t just from Fisk’s presence or that horrible polite smile he was giving her, but a mental blip, another reminder that she was perfectly capable of walking away from all of this right at this second.  Nothing bad would happen if she didn’t want it to. She had chanted under her breath and in her mind as her car crept along lonely roads, collecting dust in the tires and sucking heat from the unseasonable balmy sun, that of all the poor bastards she’d dealt with before, Fisk was the one who was most likely to put her six feet under. October was less than three days away and summer seemed to have reared its head from the graveyard in protest of the first sheet of autumn leaves, threatening to turn even the harshest of climate change sceptics on their heads. The extra eighteen degrees heat had no weight in here as the air conditioning whirred around them, adding to the illusion that everything was “normal”.

‘Well they wouldn’t let me bring in a pen and paper,’ she said, feeling the sweat under her arms dampen her skin at the thought of the heat outside, ‘so try to keep it brief. My memory isn’t the same as it used to be.’ She wiped the corner of her eye with the side of her ring finger, pulling the runaway dust of her eyeshadow away from her waterline, and placed her hand under her chin with two fingers slanted against her lips. Courtesy was of the essence, he would only hate her without it, but she refused to stand on full ceremony on sheer principle. The courts had decided Fisk had no freedom, she would keep hers and flaunt it just enough to let him know the kind of advantages she had over him. Had he taken a lunge at her in that second or at any other time during their discussion then Fisk would be only ceremoniously swatted by batons and hauled back to his lonely cell with nothing left from his visitor’s session but small bruises and pointless curses to throw at the walls. If she had taken a knife from her pocket and run a deep slash across his face and throat, people would have sung her name from the rooftops of Hell’s Kitchen. Not the prison guards of course, but the people outside and maybe even one or two of her fellow visitors would have found her form of justice liberating.

‘I want you to solve the mystery concerning the last remaining link between us, our mutual friend James Wesley.’ Fisk had prepared what he had would say to Madeline during his long walk from the cells to this poorly converted gym hall they called the Visiting Centre. The thought of talking to a person who had willingly exited the sacred holy land of the outside world and suffered themselves to catch a glimpse of the legally-sanctioned piece of Hades he now lived in had suddenly become daunting, and whilst any fear he had felt disappeared the moment he stepped into the room, it seemed to have taken his preparations with it and left him to improvise. Although that did have its advantages, as he was later to find out, but until then Fisk was left to face her with nothing other than instructions and a dust-devil of grief to extract from the dark place he had stored it in his mind.

She had not heard that name out loud in some time. Nelson and Murdock did not exist at the time when she had met him and had barely begun when they had parted ways, not that either Madeline or Fisk would care to discover that for some time and by the time they had it was no longer relevant. James Wesley’s name was a soured one to her, but that Fisk spoke as if he didn’t want to talk about or dwell on that empty word ‘mystery’ just made it worse, because in that moment when a meeting that was already strange became downright spooky he seemed to lightly skip over something that made her heart plummet.

( _please no_ )

Fisk was trying to curtail the emotions that speaking his name conjured. Until now, he had been good at it, almost cruelly good. Maybe it was saying it to someone who cared, or at least knew what it meant to care about Wesley, that made him fail so miserably and let the dust-devil take over. Flesh memories from that night crawled on and under his skin, a sane man’s hallucination and a madman’s curse, opening the doors for everything else to come flooding through. He focused his energies on his hands, staring intently at the chains around his wrists and convincing himself that he could contain it just as they contained him. On the back of his right hand, the punches he had thrown at Francis’ head begun stinging again the way they had when he had doused the cracks in his skin with antiseptic on his return to the hospital. His palms felt the icy limpness of Wesley’s dead hand afresh, and those two instances began existing simultaneously with one another, trapped on Wilson Fisk’s skin.

He could hear Owlsley’s voice telling him some metaphorical crap about wind and mountaintops, making the link between Vanessa’s poisoning and Wesley’s murder all by himself. That was the result Fisk could see when he looked into Madeline’s eyes. He saw her coming to him in a month’s time, maybe two, with another dead man’s name for his prize but at least with evidence other than his own suspicions to give him comfort. What he didn’t see in her was the connection - she was still trying to figure out what Wesley had to do with what she was doing here, with suspicions of her own but without the solid truth he had assumed she knew.

Madeline swallowed hard. A slamming skip, as if the ground had suddenly disappeared from underneath her feet, thudded inside her chest. So she didn’t know what she was here for.

Fisk saw the small security she had held herself with dissipate and his own heart rotted. No-one had told her he was dead. _Why would they have?_ Even he had forgotten about her until two months ago.

He swallowed hard, knowing that he would have to pass this horrific burden on to her himself. If Wesley had had any family or close relatives, Wilson would have delivered the news personally with honest, heart-wrenching condolences along with more than enough money to see them comfortably through their grief and beyond. It would have been tragic and difficult to stomach for a time, but it would have been dignified, which was the least that Wesley deserved. He most certainly did not deserve for this to be the closest thing that Fisk could provide him with; an ad-lib notice of death to Madeline Dawson three years after his body had begun rotting in the ground. What kind of friend let that be enough? For everything that James had given him-

‘You don’t know what happened to him,’ he said, ‘do you?’

 ( _happened_ )

( _past tense_ )

( _he’s a_ was _now, Madeline_ )

‘I do now,’ she said, startled that she was beginning to mirror Fisk’s tone. It was an old unshakeable habit of hers that when she came across a voice that was in anyway distinctive, be it an accent or an intonation or twang, she copied it almost without noticing. She had started doing it, or realised she did do it, when a Frenchman moved in next door to her family home when she was eight. Within two days she could bonjour better than Verhoeven and now it took her less than, well apparently less than a minute to begin making a decent copy, although for a long time she had thought the talent had gone.

(was was was was)

That huge lump of a man opposite her, in the orange uniform that he was born for, had realised his mistake. What was that phrase? “When you assume…” Well, she doubted there were very few ways Wilson Fisk could make an ass of himself but he had certainly made an ass of her. There was the beginning of an apology forming in his mouth but given that the foul mood she had begun this interview in had only been hardened by his last sentence, Madeline didn’t wait around for it to fall out of his mouth. Better to make it official, sweep it under the carpet, and cry about it on her own time in her own company.

(was was was)

 ‘Given the circumstances, I think it’s fair of me to deduce he was murdered, is that correct?’ She tapped the arm of her chair with her ring finger to try and get rid of a twitch threatening to strike without mercy, still attempting to look disinterested by leaning back as far as the back of the chair would let her.

(was-ENOUGH)

Fisk rubbed his nose with this thumb, an ugly gesture, and leaned in closer. Was he trying to disgust her or was it a natural reaction to feel like one was looking at a particularly stubborn pimple when looking at him? He was visibly straining for some semblance of composure, both the veins on his forehead beginning to push harder against his skin, and she waited for him to try and pull an emotional response out of her. That didn’t happen.

Madeline knew the difference between a liar and an honest man, and even though she thought she couldn’t trust her instincts around Fisk, she knew grief well enough to recognise it anywhere. ‘Seven bullets and no-one to claim responsibility to them. Someone shot the man I care about most and I need to know why. I’m not asking you for any kind of retribution, Madeline. You would agree perhaps that I do not deserve that. They stole a pillar from me, that’s what he was to me.’

She was half-listening, half-burying herself in her head, turning a phrase over and over in her mind that she’d heard…where had she heard that? _Saltwater’s no drink_. It was rolling around her head as he spoke, writing itself on the blank skin of Fisk’s pale face and in the depth of those heavy eyes. She could even taste salt on the inside of her cheeks and it burned against the numbness building in her chest, a ravenous confusion spooling not quite in her mind and not quite in her body.

‘If Wesley’s life was the prize they were after, then they have won and there is nothing that you or I could do about it. But I have spent my life around hunters, and there isn’t a single one of them that would not sell their children to build a shrine to commemorate their glory. I can only think that there was some other motive behind it-‘

‘You think you were the motive?’ Interrupting him held little shock factor for either of them, and he spoke so slowly it was more like walking off the bus before it hadn’t quite stopped yet before throwing yourself off it halfway through the ride. _Saltwater’s no drink._ ‘It would certainly fit your psychological profile for you to think this thread somehow links itself to you, Mr Fisk.’

Someone behind her started crying loudly, drawing the attention of the guards and several of the visitors. None of the inmates other than the woman’s son seemed to register the sound, either out of a lack of empathy or of novelty in the sound to provide sufficient reason for their interest. Madeline should have been crying. She should have had the chance to break down at the news of his death like anyone else in her position would, and instead Fisk had forced her to sit like a stoic and listen to his tears instead.

‘The thread is around you, Madeline, not me,’ he said, almost as if he was still trying to accept what he was saying as he said it, not because he didn’t believe what he was saying but for some other reason that she couldn’t put her finger on just yet.

Since he had entered the room, they had looked directly into each other’s eyes perhaps only four times for barely as many seconds each time around, choosing instead to politely look at their laps or glance at the guards or at the desk neither of them had touched. Granted, it wasn’t as if they had spoken much, but a full ten minutes had already flown by and it felt like even longer. Madeline hadn’t realised but she had spent most of the conversation (if you could call it that) looking at the single blush stitch that passed for Fisk’s mouth, whilst Fisk had glared so strongly at his hands that he could have melted a hole straight through the bones, but now, now their eyes locked. You could have heard the click echo around the room, a distant but distinct sound like the cocking of a pistol or a lock turning in a door.

Fisk drew in a deep breath that swelled his already enormous chest. He had lost nothing of the bulk or muscle that he had walked into this prison with, not that he had anyone around him to intimidate or impress, but he had kept a meticulously close eye on his appearance from Day One. How would Vanessa feel if she saw him walk away from this as any less of the man she had made him in to? He would not let his current misfortune change what she had so lovingly and beautifully sculptured out of his natural mess. He would not shame her like that, would not bring her any more pain than he already had, when she held the only candle at the other end of this tunnel. Madeline would help with that too in a small way, and within time he would see that glowing angel again, the only proof he needed that there was goodness left for him to strive for.

However, now was the time to address the raging blaze at the other end of this tunnel, the one that was choking him with thick rancid guilt and humming silence, the one that threatened to tear him apart if he couldn’t find a way to put it out and soon. He had to reach the other side, or bring the other side to him, otherwise life would no longer just be stale but it would collapse in on itself around him. He trusted Wesley’s faith in Dawson without question, and the bulk of the arrangements were in place for what needed to happen, with now only requiring a few more pawns to be moved for the new game to begin.

_Pawns. That afternoon in Philadelphia, playing chess in the hotel room. Wind battering the windows and the glass shaking in the grip of the storm, trees bent and rain shattering against the sidewalk. Wesley had hung his jacket on the back of his chair, resplendent in his white shirt which had the glow of nostalgia now but at the time had probably been dulled by the raging clouds outside that soaked the world in grey, save for the occasional flash of manic lightning. Fisk could have taken the game in five moves, but Wesley only needed two more to convert his check into a checkmate. Wilson watched him carefully to see whether or not he would take his chance._

‘Wesley had great faith in you, Madeline, and he admired your abilities,’ Fisk continued, aware that he had let his last sentence fall in the air for too long. Their silence blocked out the murmurs of nearby conversations but it worked no such wonders for his memories.

‘Whilst he never left any instructions of his own per se as to what should happen in the event of his death-‘ what an ashen word ‘-I think that in these circumstances he would trust you to find out what happened.’

_He forfeit the game and Fisk said nothing._

 ‘When you retired, he told me that whilst we had lost a useful resource, your profession had lost its greatest asset. I don’t remember him ever speaking so honestly or so fondly about any of our connections. I would have liked to have had this conversation somewhat earlier, but trying to make an impact out there when you’re stuck in here is a lot…slower than I anticipated, and I was informed that you were particularly difficult to locate.’

Wesley never lost tabs on her. Madeline was under no illusions as to that, and either Fisk thought she was naïve enough to take his word as gospel on the subject or Wesley had managed to bury the information before someone had buried him. She was also under no illusions as to the real extent of Fisk’s influence in the outside world. People like Fisk don’t just walk away, they die like an echo rippling and bouncing around an empty hall, and Fisk had been big noise whilst he lasted. The high ceiling felt miles away from them, as if it were part of the sky rather than the building itself and that clouds would soon begin swaying in and out of the room on the thick evening breeze. If it had fallen then, crushing all of those inmates and guards and visitors, men, women and children, under its immense weight, would the death toll have been any different to the one that Madeline would be counting when this was all over? She squirmed under the stifling pressure of his gaze, completely stale and pristinely cold. That wasn’t something she should be thinking about.

Madeline wouldn’t be the first to break away. He was testing her as much as she was testing him, after all he had little reason to trust her even with Wesley’s recommendation and she had none at all. ‘How _did_ you locate me?’ she asked, trying to ignore the light, ascending prickle on her arm that felt as if a spider was making a running track of her sleeve. Dirt seemed to settle on every inch of her exposed skin and crawl onto her lips, urging her to fall away from his eyes and look at the floor or the edge of her shirt. Fisk wouldn’t get the better of her. She might consider his proposal, but like hell was he going to be in control.

( _was was was was_ )

(he’s dead)

‘Wesley actually tried to get in contact with you on the night that he died,’ Fisk said, that glare over-powering any effect these new revelations might have had on her. ‘My fiancée, Vanessa, had been poisoned and my mother was being victimised - all of this is in the file - so he was going to ask for your help. He never stopped looking out for you, not that anyone noticed, which I suppose was probably for the best. Given the…unusual circumstances that we found ourselves in at this time, I suppose it was all that he could do.’

Unusual circumstances. The man in the mask? It took her some time to remember that used to be the name they called Daredevil. Did he fit into this somehow? She’d never cared much for the swarm of Avengers and superheroes that had suddenly come forward since the Battle of New York, and Daredevil (a stupid fucking name by anyone’s standards) frightened her more than he made her feel safe, although she couldn’t tell whether to put that down to arrogant principles or her own connections to the man opposite her. Would _he_ care that she had given up working for Fisk, that she hadn’t gone near those kind of operations since, that she had no idea about anyone or anything anymore? Daredevil scared her because she wasn’t sure how guilty she was, and if she didn’t know then how was a rogue vigilante going to judge her, should the mood take him to finish off the stragglers he’d left behind she may very well have been somewhere on his list.

‘Someone could have come to me afterwards,’ she said, shaking off Daredevil’s shadow and Wesley’s in one fell swoop.

Fisk sighed, not out of exasperation but because he hadn’t expected her to make him spell everything out for her. He thought she might have cared enough for Wesley’s memory, or for the loss of human life on principle, to have trusted him to some degree rather than try to see if he would trip up in his version of events and discover something hidden in his intentions. He just wanted to find out who killed his friend. Why couldn’t she see that? Why did she have to _question_ that?

( _stay calm, Wilson, anger will only break your abilities, it won’t make them stronger)_

The voice of Dr Hosseini, the poor excuse for a psychiatrist he had been forced to see for a few months, bounced around his mind, and he managed to count to ten before speaking again. ‘His instructions concerning you were very specific. You were not to be approached unless Wesley commanded it, and no-one other than Wesley was to have direct contact. After things got _messy_ and I ended up here, everyone under my care went underground, but now that it’s safe for most of them to be out in public again, I decided that this loose end needs tying up. And you obviously agree. Don’t you agree, Madeline?’

‘Out in public?’ She shuffled her limbs about a little, not sure of how to sit properly anymore. No-one likes to find out they’ve been, well, ‘stalked’ must have been the phrase she was thinking with, but Wilson didn’t look at it so frightfully. Perhaps because he had never quite felt the same as others did in terms of hunter and hunted, knowing that he was almost always viewed as the former even when it worked more than one way. He merely protected his assets, sometimes from themselves more than any outside parties, and that was what she had been and what she was going to become again.

‘He’s about ten metres behind you,’ he said, ‘on your left.’ A good asset, but still only that. He looked away from her for a split second to indicate the prison guard standing by the door, slicked back brown hair and small shoulders, the one who rarely took his eyes away from their table.

Madeline didn’t look away from Fisk, knowing that she would have to walk past the indicated on her way out, and tilted her head backwards just a touch to feel her spine move against her shoulders. That was another one of her tics, which had the unfortunate effect of making her look down her nose at present company and often lead to bad first impressions, but in this instance it was the opposite.

(Wesley used to do that)

‘I don’t mean to intimidate you, Madeline, in fact you have nothing to be intimidated by. I am after all incarcerated.’

His attempt at humour fell flat. Something harsh and absinthial sharpened the focus in her eyes and tightened her brow, not offence or provocation or anything that he could slap one word over. It was beyond his comprehension and although he sensed her fear it dissolved under his detection, slipping underneath this new exterior like a cub hiding behind the powerful machine it called mother. When her voice hit his ear again, a cruel joy bouncing under her relaxed smile, he began to get a glimpse of what Wesley had seen in her all those years ago, although he was too confused by her sudden change of direction and atmosphere that it took him a long time to realise what was happening.

‘What’s it like in here, Wilson? How are you holding up?’ She locked her fingers together and cupped her palm around her right knee, lifting up her ankle at the same time to rest on her left thigh. It was half-teenager, half-psychiatrist and full-on contemptuous. Fisk looked over at Gordon, the guard he had indicated earlier, almost involuntarily the way he used to turn to Wesley when he felt the need to give or receive reassurance, but Gordon’s attention had been snagged by another one of the guards, not one that Fisk recognised which meant he must have worked in one of the exterior blocks, and didn’t catch his eye.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Oh come off it, Mr. Fisk,’ she said, grinning. ‘You’ve been in here for three years and I’m your first real contact with “out there”, as you so delightfully put it, so let’s pretend “out there” still gives a crap and do a little small talk. We’ll be polite, put on our manners, and chat about your emotions and your state of mind and how being in prison is oh so difficult but you’ll struggle through and be a better man at the end of it. If it ever does end. Because you’re not the only one at this table who can pretend to care. I can pretend all day that James Wesley gave a damn about me as anything more than a resource and I can pretend that you saw him as anything more than a PA with a handgun and decent aim. I’m even prepared to pretend that what you want and what you feel is worth something to me, to anyone outside of your own messed up head, and frankly I think I’ll deserve an Oscar at the end of it but I’ll do it. Would it feel good for someone to act like you mattered, or to tell you that anything you say or do makes the slightest bit of difference outside of this prison? If you really cared about who killed Wesley, why don’t you use some of your threads in the police department or in the FBI to help you with your little conscience issues? Is your sense of poetic justice really still that strong after all this time?’

Madeline never raised her voice above normal, but when she finally stopped, Fisk’s ears were still ringing with the aftershock of her words the way that screams still drum around the air for minutes after silence falls. It was an indignity, one more straw on the camel’s back, and she knew it. Whether she was trying to provoke him or she was telling the truth became blurred but her words were still sharp, needle-felting his anger and his appearances to back him into a corner. Fisk’s hands clamped tightly in on themselves and his lips pouted, pushed out from under each other as his teeth clenched together. It was a child’s rage, she thought, but we have a lot to fear from children, especially ones this old.

‘There’s nothing poetic about this,’ he said, with his low voice firm and slow but a tremble started shaking in his ribs, the frustration getting caught in an unforgiving web in the centre of his chest. ‘My friend is dead and there’s nothing I can do. You can. I’m not asking you to care about me, I’m asking you to care that a murderer is out there and unpunished. Isn’t that what people “out there” are meant to care about?’

‘Did you?’ Madeline was dissecting everything he said, lifted by the fact that she was in no danger of forgetting a single word between them. Nothing would make her forget this moment, the moment she sat in front of Wilson Fisk and broke into his psyche. Forget the pen and paper, this was burned on her brain forever more. More though, she needed just a bit more from him if she was to be completely satisfied.

This was insufferable to Fisk. He could have stood for the insults she threw at him, just about stomach what she said about Wesley, but nothing he was saying was sticking to her. She dodged everything, not a shred of pain or fear left on any part of her. ‘Very much so. Caring about people is what put me in here.’ What was this creature in front of him? How could she be laughing at a time like this? Had she not been told not ten minutes ago that someone she knew had been murdered? 

‘Ah yes, I remember the judge’s sentencing now. “Wilson Fisk, I sentence you to life for caring too much.” What got you in here is that you got caught,’ she professed, putting down her elbows on the table and setting her foot back down on the floor. Fisk could see that whatever she was planning on saying next, it tasted sweet to her and he could see the smile hit her mouth before it appeared. ‘The Devil called you out, Fisk.’ There it was. The gun she wanted to shoot him with had finally been drawn.

There was her mistake. She’s given him her bottom line, her final push, and he knew exactly how to go from here. ‘Then I need you to play Devil’s Advocate, Madeline.’ He could see her applauding his turn of phrase, but before she could dwell on it for too long he continued. ‘Catch who killed Wesley and deliver them to the punishment they deserve for their crime. Just like the Mask did to me.’ They locked eyes again, the click softer now, all of their cards now on the table that neither of them touched, and Fisk asked her one last time. ‘Will you take the case?’

‘Send me all of the files and I’ll think about it. There may be nothing I can do, but I’ll try,’ she said, the tail of her last word getting snapped by the sound of the bells. Visiting hours were over. She lingered just long enough for the bells to stop before standing, dragging her arms off the desk and pulling down the ends of her sleeves. ‘For Wesley.’

It would be three weeks before Wilson heard anyone other than himself say Wesley’s name out loud again, although it would bound around the circles he used to revolve in like John Healy in a bowling alley, and Madeline’s voice would slowly start to replace his own every time he thought about his old friend. None of this mattered now, of course, because she was gone before he could say thank you. The visitors rippled away and the guards began filtering forward, ordering them up one by one, leaving Fisk for his own personal entourage that came in once everyone else was back in their cells.

Gordon came in first, followed by the others. He searched Fisk’s face for their pre-approved signal, keeping his head still and low to avoid seeming any more interested than the others. Fisk rubbed his right thumb across his the nail of his index finger two times to let Gordon know to forward the file to Madeline’s office, making sure they would arrive before she did. Gordon blinked twice and tapped the side of his thigh: “message received and understood”.

Old cogs were turning again in Hell’s Kitchen.


	2. Reuben Skies

1

Matt hauled the bag over his shoulder, shifting his grip on his cane with a little throw-and-catch motion. The door closed behind him with the outside mesh pocket of his bag narrowly missing getting caught on the handle. His legs were stiffened from last night’s exertion, along with just about every other muscle in his body, and sitting in the office all day hadn’t helped at all.

The familiar smell of concrete walls and floors guided him better than any living thing, like his father was there beside him whispering where to go, and as he breathed it all in all other thoughts of work, Karen, Foggy, Claire, and…”other work” slipped away like oil on water. He could sense no changes in the room other than the traces of the day’s patrons - around sixty, all recognised regulars - and Tracy Reagan staying later than usual in her office, or at least later than billed. He knew she worked a separate, less legal business from there, but it was neither his concern nor his priority, so he kept a distance and an ear out for any changes. She shouted hey when she saw him come in, poking her head through the office window as the door closed behind him before going back to her paperwork, leaving him to his own devices as per their unspoken agreement.

The music from upstairs filtered down through the floorboards, with Rihanna signalling the impending close of the evening’s Salsa class. Tracy had overseen the conversion of the old storage room upstairs into a dance studio, even being so courteous as to ask Matt’s opinion before giving the go-ahead, and it brought more people in every week as, slowly, people began to get used to the idea of the old boxing studio being an “acceptable” place to be again. Over the years it had acquired the same state of public opinion as a haunted house - nobody went there unless they had ghosts to deal with. Now it was less of a memorial and more of a revived tradition, with new classes and patrons all the time, and Matt could hear every step of the final routine, spinning and tumbling about on the floor, people laughing and sweating and laughing some more at their own boldness or stupidity or graceless feet.

He walked into the men’s restroom and hid there until they had all left, knowing that they would have to walk through his space as they left and went home for the day, and he hoped to avoid any casual recognition of his clockwork routine. He could deal with Foggy knowing where he was, and Tracy knowing was inevitable, but this required absolute focus and a mental privacy that any kind of company or acquaintance would not let lie. The freak heatwave meant the air conditioning was still burling and he knew there would be thunder in a matter of hours, given the subtle scent-taste of steel in the air, so after stripping down to the vest under his t-shirt and wrapping up his hands, he used up a third of his water as he simultaneously planned ahead for the night and turned over the day’s events in his head.

Matt wouldn’t normally have let work bother him this much once he’s clocked out, especially after the day he’d already had, but the horrific thought of that kid as Lantom had called him (he was only nineteen after all) splatting on the concrete, smashing his head in to keep an unspoken evil at bay whilst his insides soaked into the sidewalk, was too much to be kept at bay until the case was over. Perhaps not even then.

With the Salsa class was finally disbanded and the building empty, save for himself and Tracy, he took up one of the bags and got to work. Not since Fisk had it taken more than a week to bring someone down, his average track-and-desist time being four-and-a-half days. He didn’t miss it. Now that Fisk was back in the game however Matt needed to begin using that extra focus he’d lost somewhere down the road and start to channel it into something more useful than just a state of mind. The dull rippling thud of his fist against the bag brought the thought of Upcott back, cruelly mimicking the sound his body would have made when it hit the concrete.  He’d heard that noise before, made it before himself by himself or on others, and he shut them all out of his head pushing them into his hands instead. Slam after slam after slam and slam again, here and then and here then slam, Fisk slam then slam here…

It wasn’t beyond Fisk to be planning _something_ from the confines of his cell, although with any luck the weaknesses in his network would serve to slow Fisk down enough for Matt to move in before anything happened. A vanity boost couldn’t be ruled out, of course. Get his name out in the newspapers, feel at the centre of things again, and become relevant. There had been a time when Fisk had been all over the media, ruling the fourth estate from the front row, and it was the only part of his former power that could be reached from behind bars. The public lust for criminals doesn’t restrict itself to the ones on the streets.

It stopped having any meaning after about forty minutes, not that the pull of inertia was enough to make him stop, rather just fall into an innate rhythm. Tracy’s phone started ringing in her office, a custom ringtone for a “friend” no doubt as Beautiful Liar began playing, and without his focus he started listening, all the while still throwing punches. The thud of the bag couldn’t block it out and neither could he, and the steel in the clouds started rolling in faster from the west-

2

The warm wind pushed in faster from the west as she drove towards the light on the side of the highway. Windows down and sweat drying under her shirt, Madeline’s legs were shaking as her feet pressed down on the accelerator to get to the diner before she completely lost control. It was on the horizon, that inevitable breakdown and the sadness she had to shove back face-to-face with Fisk. She could feel the tendrils of it reach her before it even thought about rearing its horrific face and was determined not to let it better her until she let it, so the shack at the side of the road was her best bet at pulling herself together in time to at least make it through her front door. Coffee, especially the kind of bitterly revolting stuff she could expect there, had always managed to reinforce her defences, or at least she had to pretend it did now. Tricking _herself_ , that was her real master skill, although she wouldn’t even have known what she was doing.

Four other cars were in the lot when she parked up, alongside two removal trucks and a black van. She locked the car and started to walk towards the diner, but she turned back and took her notebook and pen out of the glove compartment. Dust was clinging to the treads in her tires, barely visible in the dusk light, and she made a mental note to get her old bike out of storage for these trips in the future. The Harley street bob had been a present from her dad about four years ago when she got her first “proper job” at the finance firm, having been told for the five years beforehand that even if she was good at it, being a private detective was little more than playing real-life Cluedo after turning up late to the game. With Dad, if it wasn’t 9 til 5 it wasn’t a real job. Soldiers were boys with toys and teachers were either too lazy to make up their minds about whether or not they wanted kids or they wanted to get ahead in the game of the ones that they already had. Still, the bike wasn’t just good, it was beautiful. She called her Reuben, an inside joke she wouldn’t dare tell her father about.

Reuben might have a smaller engine than the XF, which she had made a point of buying for herself, but if it got to the point where she was getting followed or someone tried to intercept her on her way to or from the visiting room, Reuben could slip smoother than silk past anyone and anything. More importantly, if Fisk or the odious Gordon got any ideas about using her as a getaway driver, they would be sorely disappointed to find out there was no room on the non-existent backseat, let alone the bullet-proof glass and reinforced steel doors they were used to.

A green neon sign announced the diner to be simply called “Havana” to the ten people who were near enough to read it. Inside the lights were bright but tainted yellow, which was no doubt made even worse when the sun went down by the neon glare from outside, and the yellow floor tiles gave the place a lemon feel. It was sharp to be there, but sharp was good. She took a seat by the window and opened her notebook to the back page, where there was an emergency list of contacts too sensitive to be left in her phone. Hacking was just as much of a threat as theft, if not more, so she left the important numbers here. Underneath her parents’ home phone was Tracy Reagan, ex-girlfriend and ex-personal trainer, then McNamara, her old dance partner, a few business contacts that she’s lost touch with, and then at the very end…

The pen strike through James Wesley’s name had as many years on it as he had years dead, but it felt right to run another one through it, something more final and not born of spite. She ordered coffee from the waitress, trying to smile, and looked back down at the list. Out of all of them, the only one she couldn’t call an ex-something was her parents. They were ex-clients, ex-lovers, ex-employers…

Tracy Reagan was her only point of call, or rather the only one there was any point to calling. For the help that she needed, a more personal touch was required. Tracy was cold, and she had every reason to hate Madeline’s guts, but she would come around if for no other reason than she would love to beat the shit out of Madeline (and get away with it).

She picked up on the first ring, which was new. Perhaps she hadn’t checked her caller ID. ‘Tracy, it’s me,’ she said, waiting for the inevitable bitter cussing to begin. There was a deep breath on the other end of the line and Madeline held onto hers, silently mouthing a thank you to the waitress who looked like she was on her last legs. The trucker and the three families looked like they were keeping her plenty occupied, with the time of night slowly seeping into all of them but Madeline, and with no-one to help her out but her own fading energy, the waitress snaked back around the counter and marched onwards with her newest orders.

‘You have got some fucking nerve, Maddy, you really fucking have,’ Tracy said eventually, ‘if you’ve got something to say you really need to come down here and say it to my face so I can tell you where to shove it in the way you deserve to be told to shove it.’

‘I know, I should, except I’m a little far out of town for that right now, and I need to sort this out now.’

Here it began: ‘Sort out what? You gonna run out halfway through this conversation to go chasing after some pasty ass white guy whilst I put my ass on the line to help you out like you always do? Like hell am I listening to whatever you have to say, Madeline Dawson, you can-‘

God it felt good to hear her voice again, even if it was unrelentingly angry. Madeline knew she deserved it and was more than willing to hear everything Tracy could throw at her for what she had done, but now wasn’t the time. ‘I’m getting back in the game again, Tracy,’ she said, cutting off Tracy’s increasingly loud and bitter ranting. There was silence at the other end, whilst the trucker at the counter started hitting on the waitress who was in no mood to put up with him, and she knew Tracy had just pulled down her left sleeve around her wrist the way she always did when she was starting to get nervous.

‘…Dating or-‘

‘The other one,’ Madeline said, smiling at the little shake in Tracy’s voice. She still cared, no matter how big her mouth got and how loud she shouted, Tracy still gave a damn. _Of course she does, she’s a good person, and she’s not an ass like you_. ‘Just one case, I promise-’

3

At first Tracy had forgotten Matt was even there, screaming at the top of her lungs down the phone at this Madeline girl, but she calmed down as quickly as she had riled up. Her heart rate was still elevated and her breathing was heavy, so much so that Matt could hear the effects of a five year smoking habit in both of them. There was still some fight left in her though, hell, quite a lot of fight. ‘And you want me to spill the beans, I suppose? I told you, I’m not listening to whatever you have to say.’ Good on you, Tracy, he thought, switching over his feet to practice left-hand forward.

Madeline held her own, a cold serious tone taking over the warmth in her voice. ‘No, I don’t need or want you to do any of that for me, I couldn’t put you on the line like that again. I was just wondering if you still run self-defence classes at the gym.’

Now Matt was only throwing punches for cover, trying not to arouse Tracy’s attention as he listened intently to her conversation. Whoever Tracy was talking too was scared in a way that was a little more than just scared of what was lurking around the corner in the alleyway. She knew what was there, like he did, and Tracy swallowed hard. ‘Is it that bad?’ she asked, afraid of the answer. Her teeth were clenched tight and her voice was low, the way it was when she spoke to her other less legal clients, but her trade was the furthest thing from her mind.

4

‘It’s really bad. I’ll pay whatever you ask for,’ Madeline said, running her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. ‘I just need to make sure I can take what this is going to throw at me. And maybe some other people too.’ She kept an eye on the waitress and the trucker in case things got ugly, but the waitress was holding her own. It was the family in the corner that was giving her the most grief, arguing loudly about how much longer it would take to get to their destination and what route would be the best to take.

‘Should I be worried?’ Whether she meant for herself, for Madeline, or for her trade, Madeline wasn’t sure, but either way the answer was the same. For now.

‘No, no, no more than usual.’

‘…Okay, if you’re sure.’ She sounded unconvinced. ‘The classes have stopped but I can organise one-on-one training, I’ll do it if I have to but I’ll see if I can get hold of Brent.’

‘Thank you, Tracy.’ Madeline wrote down a reminder note to send Tracy a box of those truffles she liked so much as a thank you. She felt guilty for lying to her, given all that Tracy did for her during her first few years as a “private investigator”. Tracy had endangered her trade to help Madeline get information, sometimes even put herself on the line just to give Madeline the edge she needed to catch the people Tracy relied on for her business. It was worse now, knowing that she’d not only done it all in the name of Fisk, but that her investigations had all been pointless anyway. Wesley had used Madeline, but that meant he’d used Tracy too, and that was…

It was exactly what she was doing right now.

‘Am I allowed to ask what the case is?’

Was it any wonder Fisk had managed to get away with so much? _Look at what he’s turned you into, Madeline!_ her mind cried out, a long-forgotten part of her heart in turmoil at the thought of bringing Tracy anywhere near this. But then there was another part of her, she couldn’t tell where, that told her she had always been like this and that Wesley hadn’t made her do anything she wasn’t already capable of doing. She was entirely calm.

‘I think it’s best if you don’t know,’ Madeline said. ‘I’ll catch up with you when it’s all over, but until then...’

‘Alright,’ Tracy said, voice nothing but a hopeless sigh. ‘Guess I’ll see you around then.’

‘Yeah. I’ll see you later babe- sorry, old habits,’ Madeline apologised, trying to fit everything she had to be sorry for in that one word. ‘I’ll see you later, _Tracy_.’ She held the phone to her ear long after Tracy had hung up on her, trying to recall the warmth of her hand against her cheek through the cold screen. It was the raised voices in the corner that snapped her back to reality – the trucker had now become quite loud in his unwarranted advances towards the poor girl. Madeline would have loved to intervene, it wouldn’t have been the first time, but the need for cover and to remain unnoticed only brought her money from her wallet and her feet out the door again. She reconciled the slight however in a small victory that she wouldn’t get to see the punchline of. She noticed the logo on the trucker’s hat, matched it to his truck, and keyed the doors and mirrors before driving away, silently hoping that someone else in that diner was a little braver than her.

5

Matt could have tried to strike up a conversation with Tracy and got more information out of her, but their mutual agreement to remain barely on a first-name basis was too important to his routine. Instead he spent the hour straining to hear every word she said and every movement she made. She booked the ring for Madeline in her diary on three separate dates but with no time slots, made a call to the aforementioned Brent, whom Matt understood to be some kind of mixed martial arts instructor who regrettably was not available to resume his coaching of the women’s self-defence class due to scheduling conflicts and an upcoming holiday with his children in Toronto. There had been a sharp rise in demand for such instructors since Fisk was arrested and Frank tried to mow his way through half the city’s criminals singlehandedly. He had no doubt that his own activity had probably begun this trend but the city was better for it. There had been several cases that had fallen on his lap in recent months where the victim, usually female or elderly or both, had been the one giving the blows rather than receiving them. The more they could defend themselves, the better.

He considered offering his own services as an instructor, but there wouldn’t be many people willing to give themselves to training under the instruction of a blind man, and he had met most of those who were – he was one of them, after all.

His hour up, he left with a half-hearted goodbye said in Tracy’s general direction. She saw him go but was mid-conversation with another instructor, pleading with him for help, so could only raise her hand to reply, a move which she instantly realised for its foolishness. The sun was still in the sky and beat down heavily through the window of his taxi, the driver of which was mercifully silent after Matt gave him his address.  Driving around the city in the back of a cab used to be one of his favourite things to do. Things would become all mashed up by the speed and the tempo of the traffic, all the smells and sounds that would be as clear as crystal to him as he walked would all meld into one great blur, and in a rare moment of peace he could zone out to the point where sometimes he wouldn’t even feel the taxi stop. There would be small moments when they would have to pause along the way, at traffic lights or during congestion, and he would come out of his trance to catch the sound of a child’s fluttering heartbeat and smell their mother’s perfume as they walked past on the sidewalk, but these moments were more precious because they stood out from the blur. Nothing stayed still in New York for long and soon the heartbeat would become static and the perfume indistinguishable from the petrol fume haze.

Fisk would never know how he had robbed Matt of this small and rare private joy, but if he had ever learned of it, the pride might have caused him to burst. The constant pressure of knowing everything that was going on around him whilst pretending to be completely ignorant of it all, how mad it drove him to have lost one of the few means of escaping it. Driving home now he could tell tales about everyone he drove past, both those out on the street and those in their homes and workplaces, even those in the passing cars. It was the unavoidable consequence of his training. As it had intensified in order to bring down Fisk, he lost this small sensation and he cursed Fisk every time he stepped inside a taxi, in addition to all the other times he did so. Waking up in the morning, he spat on the name as he remembered the rifts it caused between himself and the only two people he could ever bear to call friends. When he went to church, more than half of his prayers went out to Fisk’s victims. He thought of him whenever he noticed Karen staring into space, her heart pounding, clearly thinking of her unfortunate acquaintance with Fisk’s influences. Every punch to the head reminded him of how the guards had turned the other cheek as Fisk slammed Matt’s skull down on the table, of how Gordon and Wesley (he learned their names with a particular venom) had lowered their guns to allow Fisk to unleash that nightmarish tantrum on him, and of how Fisk had driven him to Claire over and over again. The anger came in useful during the night but it was still there at daybreak, haunting him and prodding his ribs to try and pull the devil out of him.

The taxi driver offered to help him to the door of his apartment, but he gently declined, paid his fare, and went inside the building he was slowly beginning to loathe.

6

Karen walked past the gallery for about the fourteenth time, still not sure whether she should go in. What good would it do? Vanessa was no longer there, there was no-one she could apologize to, confess to, or bring herself to even look at. But the gallery had been in the back of her mind for weeks now, along with Matt’s choking and trembling voice telling her about his encounter with the man himself there. Fisk. Her dream had been the same every night this month, the same one she had had the night she killed James Wesley. She had changed apartments twice since but when she opened her eyes every morning she still thought she was there, in the dark of night with the lemon light of the street glazing her curtains, the awful bed and the whiskey on the bedside table, the sudden appearance of Fisk’s unmistakable shadow and his pretence of understanding. Her heart would pound and she would try her best to hold back the scream, sometimes sputtering out a noise like a wounded animal in compensation for the great bellow of fear in her chest. Fisk imparting wisdom to her about the habit of murder –

She couldn’t separate her own crime from the mention of his name, she could not judge him because she understood too little and knew too much what it felt like to be him in that moment of deciding to take a life. She killed Wesley, he killed Ben. The only difference was that he suffered for both of those crimes, from the loss of his friend and the consequences of his crimes, whilst every morning she breathed a free air and every day she walked as a free person. She could walk around in that gallery if she wanted to, yet she felt no more able than Fisk to do it. Karen walked away, looking briefly at a speeding black XF before fixing decidedly on going home.

 

 

 


	3. The Fabric of Life

She didn’t dare open the file at the office where they had been delivered. Not because she thought someone else might read it, she was the first one to arrive – not many people turn up to work voluntarily at 4 in the morning – and even then she trusted the girls around her. Each of them had their weird little quirks and not-so-legal backstories. No one like a snitch, especially if you work in finance. Madeline had worked in a criminal underworld and she would still rather have crossed any one of the crooks she met there than any one of these girls. They were all here because they liked money, especially other people’s money. Logan Finance took a liberal interest rate from its clients but it was a worthwhile investment. In 78 years of business there had never been a single robbery, hacking, expenses scandal, or any incident that would have ruined its impeccable reputation. And for all that they still worked on the third floor of a run-down building in Hell’s Kitchen.

It was a good place for a former thief to work. No background checks – a criminal record was almost required on entry -, no male co-workers, and no questions. Not that it was an unfriendly place either. Madeline and the other girls in the office were all peas in a pod with one another and with the rest of the miscellaneous office workers in the building. A regular home-from-home kind of place. When Jenny arrived, 6am on the dot as she usually did, she knew something was wrong. Madeline usually arrived at 10 for starters but she obviously hadn’t slept, her eyes were red and her face almost grey. She got sent home immediately with orders for a hot water bottle, chocolate, and a classic movie marathon in bed.

Jenny was a sweet girl and Madeline had thought a few times about asking her out, but she remained stubbornly straight to everyone else’s extreme disappointment. She played the straight white rich girl trope perfectly and unfortunately not ironically either. She was a determined matchmaker who had once tried to get Madeline to ask out the guy from upstairs who was always coming down to borrow instant coffee from them. ‘He may not look like much but he seems like a nice guy,’ Jenny had said to her, ‘and he’s a lawyer, so you know-‘ ‘Jenny, the day I fuck a lawyer is the day that I get paid a million dollars to do it.’ Madeline should have hated her but she couldn’t. It was fucking unbearable.

Somehow she got home. The file was on the end of her bed, disregarded. She had to be in the right state of mind before looking at it. Her wardrobe was one of those small cupboards with glass sliding doors but she didn’t see herself in her reflection, looking past it as she got inside. It had been too long since she had last seen Wesley, too long for her memories to change and her opinion to warp, and she didn’t trust her own head alone. Memories are almost always wrong, she told herself, as she had often found it to be true. Little details are always altered or entirely forgotten, words morph into their familiars, and colours blend into one another. Madeline threw her shoe box out of the way to get to the little hole at the back.

Curling her finger inside, she released the small door and pulled out a large wooden box engraved with Celtic knots on each side and trio of roses, complete with thorns, on the lid. The box was covered in dust which she removed with a slow swipe of her sleeve and smelled of age. When she was younger, she pretended it was a grand family heirloom passed down through dozens of generations, rescued from fires, and hidden from thieves throughout the centuries. In reality, it was a gift from her parents who bought it in a flea market in Portugal on one of their holidays, during which Madeline had been forced to stay with her Aunt Flora, who ate nothing but salad all day and lectured Madeline on the importance of vitamins and the dangers of cheeseburgers, milkshakes, candy bars, chocolate, and anything that wasn’t pulled straight from God’s shit-coloured and shit-fertilized earth.

This little box was her key to remembering, to making keeping her memories exactly the way that they should be. Inside were photographs of her childhood friends, copies of her sister’s baby scans, numerous tickets for movies – all were catalogued with dates and times and other important details on the flip side, including a reference number. She kept a log of everything in the box which corresponded to each number. The log fast becoming a novel series and now expanded more than three reporter’s pads, each with the reference contents written on the back page. She dug down to the bottom of the box to a parcel wrapped in pink tissue paper. On the paper was the reference number 2-10-4-6-S. She found the corresponding log and read:

“Shirt from the 6th of April 2010, the night Carver carved a four-inch shard of glass into my chest in Greenacres car park, Hell’s Kitchen, for trading confidential financial and logistical information to James Wesley and Fisk (thanks, asshole). Was found by stranger, taken to General hospital, operation performed on lungs, pacemaker fitted after resulting cardiac arrest. One visitor: James Wesley. Also the night that Carver’s entire operation was taken out and Carver kidnapped. Transferred to care of Fisk’s private doctors at 4am on the 7th. Discharged on 12th and taken into protective custody with Wesley. Carver killed 13th.”

Unwrapping the shirt, she was more shocked by the patches of white that had managed to survive rather than the explosion of red that gushed out from the tear on the right-breast pocket. The shirt had been bought three days after her twenty-first birthday with some of the money that her father gave her. The rest went towards Reuben and the best leathers her funds could buy. The stains on the shirt weren’t her blood, or any blood. Wesley washed it out for her whilst she was still in hospital, bringing it back to her in prime condition on the day of her discharge. When they got to the safe-place, she asked for red fabric dye and told him she didn’t want the shirt clean. She told him about the box and her memory log and he agreed to help her re-stain the shirt, looking perplexed at this curious habit and not a little disappointed that his effort to clean it had been wasted. One of the guards brought the dye to them and she took off the shirt, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and laid it on the floor of the brilliant white kitchen.

She raised up her right-hand and, with the dye in her left-hand placed under her shirt, re-enacted what she remembered of how the glass entered her chest. As the faked shard pierced the cloth, she squeezed out the dye and watched it run down the fabric and on to the tiles. Wesley directed her movements, crouched down beside her with a curious air and his eyes occasionally flickering up to her flustered cheeks. He avoided looking at her exposed chest, the surgical stitches, the upcoming scars, and the lump of her chest where the pacemaker sat, quietly and patiently keeping her alive. When she finished he brought her a black jumper to cover herself with.

That was James Wesley. Quietly watching from the side, whispering the odd word into the ear of the contenders, words they couldn’t resist following. A kind gesture and a soft hand. Softer lips.

Madeline ran her hand down the creases of the shirt and, with a crackling whine, let out a small cry. Her eyes became blurry and she buried her face in the pillows of her bed, holding the shirt close to her chest and wondering if his shirt had been bloodied like hers, if he had felt the horrible metallic chill of late-night air as he lay dying, and why no stranger had come to help him but had come to her in her time of need. Only once this fit was over and James’ ghost was almost at her shaking fingertips could she bring herself to look at the file.

There were photographs. The first one was a close-up shot of his face, slumped far from elegantly to one side. She could see the two piercings in his ear and remembered the overwhelming smell of bourbon from the night Wesley told her their origin story, another drunken night in his youth, though she had kept herself from remarking that if he truly regretted them and hadn’t worn any earrings since he was that age, they would have healed since then. Madeline sat up in her bed with her knees to her chest, one hand wrapped around her legs and the other with the photograph. She placed in down on the dresser beside her bed, marking it with its own memory log reference number. The next photograph was of a map, pin-pointing the location of the warehouse where he was killed. She marked that one too and slid it down into her handbag, making that her next stop once she could haul herself from her bed.

The third photograph almost slew her. Wesley was behind a table, crumpled up in a chair, eight bullet holes in his chest. His suit jacket was open to reveal the white shirt underneath. She pulled her own bloody shirt closer to her. It was then that she knew something was wrong.

The rest of the file included the coroner’s report (failure of the major organs caused by sudden trauma and shock), a list of Wesley’s known movements on the night of his death, his phone records, a list of the items in his possession when he was found (noticeably missing his gun and any other weapon), and instructions for Madeline on how to report her findings and how to collect her reward once the culprit was identified. “Apprehension of the culprit should be left to your employer. This has been requested specially and any violation of this request will be considered gross misconduct and will result in a retraction or refusal of your reward and in termination.”

“Your employer.” Fisk used to get off on being called that, she thought bitterly. Wesley rarely called him any other name around her, though rightfully he should have called him “our employer”. She burned with shame that she had ever named herself amongst Fisk’s ranks, even if it was such minor position, shifting money from account to account under the instruction of Fisk’s accountant, the Owl. Given how successfully she managed to rise in the ranks of Carver’s operation from beginning at such a small position, she had expected, damn it she had _dreamed,_ of rising to where she had been. Yet she was stuck where she was, after everything that she had sacrificed to help Fisk’s take-over. It was that which drove her away, not what happened with Tracy. No matter how much she tried to care that her actions had caused Tracy’s accident, she couldn’t. She couldn’t care about anyone else but herself and James in those days. Now Fisk was proving that that hadn’t changed at all.

She put the rest of the file in her bag next to the map, folding her shirt away in the tissue paper again. Before the box made its way back to the hole in the wall, she took out one more memory.

2-07-12-25-Z

“C.S.R.D. (Crime Scene Reconstruction Device), Christmas gift from Stark Industries in thanks for dealing with financial hacking in September of 2007. Carver, having secured the Stark accounts in 2002, detected the breach and traced it to a Lucas Webster. Webster terminated by self.”

A pretty prize for her first termination. Stane knew what he was doing when he gave this to Carver. They used it many times to make sure any scenes of interest were entirely cleared of evidence, and it there were any attacks on Carver territory, to use the evidence found to create not only a reliable reconstruction of events, but of the attackers. With the XF in the garage, Madeline took out her leathers and got Rueben’s keys. The bag fit over her shoulders but the C.S.R.D. was shaped like long metal baton and had to be fitted into a special holster which she, like everything else, still kept.

Webster was one of Fisk’s accountants. She felt indebted to him really. Without his irresponsible and foolish attempts to take down Stark – some personal vendetta that the boy couldn’t be shaken from – Madeline would never had met Wesley, and she would have had her chance to get out from Carver’s operation before it inevitably caved in. Sure, she sped up the process by betraying him to his worst enemy, but Madeline had sensed the storm of Wilson Fisk coming a long time before Carver, who was still so far up his own ass that he thought that killing Webster and closing the breach with his own firewalls was somehow a guarantee that if he ever stood trial from the long list of crimes which could easily be brought against him then Tony Stark himself would come down and serenade the jury about what a wonderful man he was. Carver was a moron. Tony Stark had no idea the breach ever happened.

She wasn’t planning on taking the C.S.R.D. to the warehouse, it was needed elsewhere. For the second time in as many days, she called Tracy.

The gym was as derelict as it ever was. Tracy might have run the place but the owner wouldn’t let her change anything herself. The closest she got to putting her mark on the place was the dance studio upstairs and the mess of paperwork in the back office. Madeline had been here many times – fifty-six to be precise, as she forced herself to check later in her diary and count all the entries mentioning “self-defence”, “Tracy”, “Brent”, “gym”, and “muscle” – and hated every inch of it. Which was good. She came here to get angry, for her blood to boil, and to sweat and cry herself into shape. After Carver’s attack she didn’t like to be caught off-guard. There was a junior boxing class sprawling across the ring and at the bags, one little boy in the corner jumping rope whilst another kept count. She was never fond of children. They were too small, unpredictable, and unreasonable for her to feel comfortable around.

Tracy was at her desk, her wild hair pulled back tight into an explosive bun at the back of her head and a large wooden hair pin shaped like a leaf speared through it. She was in Adidas blue sweatpants and a sweaty grey shirt that stuck to her chest. Her shoes were thrown across to the other side of the room to let her feet breathe and Madeline almost gagged on the scent. She thought about the metal pins and plates holding her hips and legs in place, invisible under her smooth Eritrean skin and small dark hairs.

‘I haven’t found anyone for the classes,’ she said, not looking away from her computer screen where jolty footage of several police officers surrounding an arrest played silently. ‘Demand is pretty high right now, nothing I can do.’

‘Forget about that right now, just for a second. I got something for you.’ Madeline had deliberately changed into a low, string-vest shirt that exposed the lump on her chest where the pacemaker scar sat. She felt Tracy glare at it and wondered if she was thinking of her own scars, the ones Madeline was responsible for. Madeline reached into her purse and pulled out the C.S.R.D. and its holder. ‘I want you to use this. Keep it if you want.’

‘Why?’ Tracey snorted, her nostrils jumping out to tell Madeline she was definitely not forgiven. ‘I film crimes, I don’t solve them.’ She picked it up and wondered at how smooth it looked and felt. Madeline blinked hard as Tracy played with the light reflecting off the surface, knowingly shining it right into her face.

‘It’s not just for you, it’s for all of you and your Cop-slash-Daredevil-watch people-‘

‘ _I_ watch the cops, Deli, I don’t go looking for idiots in Halloween costumes.’ Her voice was bitter and sharp like a sour apple vodka shot. Tracy wasn’t lying. Out of all of the people in Hell’s Kitchen, she was one of the most apathetic about the recent spout of vigilantes, aliens, Norse gods, mutants, etc. She didn’t have the room in her life to care about it. Every night after closing, she went out on Copwatch, intercepting police radio and filming arrests to prevent police brutality. She had been arrested seven times on bogus charges, three of which she was bailed out on by Madeline, seven times of which she had been beaten by at least two officers.

‘Well I need you to,’ Madeline said, putting one hand on the strap of her bag and squeezing it hard. ‘I need to get a message to him and I don’t know how else to do it.’ Tracy paused the footage on her screen and put down the C.S.R.D., finally looking concerned. She was being pulled in bit by bit. ‘It’s about Fisk.’

Tracy breathed out hard through clenched teeth and leaned back in her chair away from Madeline, a flickering rage pulsing though her. Madeline could see it in the way she darted her eyes between the screen and the C.S.R.D. Tracy was trying to act mad, she had every right to be, but she was hooked. Anything to do with Fisk put Tracy in the same state that it put Madeline in – the unmistakable smell of revenge beginning to be realised. If it hadn’t been for Fisk, she wouldn’t have shattered legs and a shattered pelvis. She would still be able to dance. She would still be in the running to become one of the best amateur Salsa dancers in the state. She wouldn’t have had to give up Madeline. ‘What the fuck is it now with that piece of shit?’

Madeline told her about her meeting with Fisk and about the warning at the back of Wesley’s file: “do not terminate”. ‘As far as Fisk knows,’ she explained as she watched Tracy get more and more entranced by the story, ‘I have just as much reason as he does to get revenge on the person who killed Wesley. If I don’t have the right to do it, who does? Him. He’s planning to get out the second I find out who did it and he’s going to kill them. And once he’s out I don’t think he’s going to go back inside. Not on his own.’ Madeline started to cry gently, false but convincing. ‘I can’t let that happen, and I can’t go to the police. I have to speak to him, warn him what’s happening. I can’t stop him by myself…’ She trailed off, choking her voice on “all-consuming despair”. Tracy remained at a safe distance.

 Long story short, Madeline won. Everything was falling in to place. As far as she knew.


End file.
